If you serve me what you claim as ramen that comes in a mess of yellow frozen supermarket bought noodles tasting a bit too much like msg dunked in a crappy soup base, –

I AM GOING TO HATE AND BOYCOTT YOUR RESTAURANT RAMEN DISHES FOREVER.

You feel the need to bitch? Go ahead and do it in your own private time. Spelling out names in full online – in the process allowing robots to register it in search engines – and spewing childish “degratory remarks” is too way unethical especially when the statements are so overly baseless.

And overdue.

Has it occured to you how did Sean and I manage to come online when we’re not in the office? We got internet, yeah! But that’s not the point, the thing is – we tap into our very ‘kind’ and unknowing neighbour’s open connection, hence, free access. Thanks for sharing, Mr/Mrs/Ms linksys123!

To upkeep my style of writing and the length of the entries, I might very well take a couple of years to finish documenting these 80+ days in Shanghai. I’m changing approach, cos I’m lazy and tired after work everyday. Let’s start with a bit of statistics.. the distance, according to google map and Sean, from our apartment to our workplace = 1.2km. WALKING DISTANCE =) Make it everyday, to work and back. We leave the house at around 9.05am and on the average reach there at 9.30am. This video below I took documents the path we take from the entrance of Red Town to our company’s doorstep. Welcome, Mr Tan will show you the way.

For lunch, we ordered takeaway food through phone from another stall. It came literally as a container of rice, a ‘饭桶’. A really huge serving you got there, though I can’t say I like this more than 便当. In the days to come, thankfully we stuck to ordering lunchboxes and eating outside.

On our way back in the evening, I spotted a CD/VCD/DVD shop and went in to look for some titles. Japanese dramas and anime took up one corner of the shop and as I scanned through the rows, I picked up Fireboys (60 rmb. Takayuki Yamada, Tsukamoto Takashi, woo), Manhattan Love Story (60 rmb. This one’s hard to find! Tsuka Takashi tee hee) and Letters from Iwo Jima (15 rmb. NINONINO)! At the same time, I asked if they had Death Note anime and Battle Royale movie; both were sold out currently but they said it’s possible to replenish the stock in about 3 days, so we said we’ll check back again. It was probably from a handphone, if not the CD player, the introduction of the song “千娇百美” from Leslie’s last album Gone With The Wind played. Ahh, I’m so certain there’re lots of Leslie fans here in China.

Just when I happily took for granted we’d be clear of all sorts of troubles if we avoided streetside food, crossed the road carefully or stayed away from clubs (lol……), we ran straight into it. None of us saw this coming, like LITERALLY. That evening, we were headed for the Carrefour at Zhong Shan Park station on a cab and there happened to be a jam along the way. Nearby, a delivery man was on his bike and we realise, it’s Macdonalds. Didn’t feel the same as ours, but I can’t remember how different. I took some pictures anyway, tried to, but they turned out bad because it was pretty dark.

The driver drover further along the side of Cloud Nine shopping mall because there were traffic police behind so he wasn’t able to drop us at the entrance. Sean, because he was on the right and the doors of most cabs can only be opened from the right, opened the door wanting to get out, for a moment he sat down again to retrieve the change from the cab driver. Then CRAAASH !! We immediately turned our heads to the right – a man of about 40, and his bicycle, fallen to the ground right in front of us. I don’t know if you can visualise this; a whole lot of bicycles were parked at the spot we alighted at such that the space between the cab and the bicycles was only a very narrow part the road and then the eleviated pavement. It took some time for our heads to process and make sense of this situation and realising it could have very well been our fault, the driver and us hurried out of the cab and to see if the man was injured. The driver helped him up, and in a moment, he very volubly complained about painful sensations in his legs and rambled on and on. Faced with such a situation, Sean and I were at a loss of what to do as even passersby stopped to watch the drama.

I reviewed the situation again with Sean, he said that the door was already open for several seconds before the man crashed into (did he even have contact with the door?!) it and that why would a cyclist riding behind not stop or take another path when a cab has already stopped right in front? It was senseless, knowing that passengers alight only from the right side and doors could be flung open ANY TIME from the point the cab stopped.

Meanwhile, the driver negotiated with him and concluded that he wanted 200 rmb as a compensation, or else off to the police station we go. 200 rmb? You mean EFFIN DAYLIGHT ROBBERY huh. Immediately I was doubtful, and called Sin Yew. An aunty ‘joined in’ and tried persuading us to just hand him the money, let the matter rest because it would be a whole lot of trouble if the police were to intercede.

Sean was telling me, “Just give him the money lah..” but I think otherwise! Go ahead and call the cops, why should we simply use money to settle this without clarifying? But still…. very reluctantly, I prepared to take a 100 rmb note (split with Sean afterward) from my wallet. Then, it was like a 360* change of attitude; once the man saw me opening my wallet, his tone immediately changed and randomly said, “你们是哪里人？Ahh, where are you from?” With which, Sean replied deliberately “香港人。We’re from Hong Kong.” Fuming, I stared at him as he took the 100 rmb note with an almost smiling face.

I have never been so mad for a long time! I turned around and stalked off, thinking how terrible those folks were, to just want to let a LOUSY and UNREASONABLE man get away with it just because they were not the ones handing him money. If this were to happen to them, I BET they would be the first to pick a fight, in three counts. I was very sure the man, on the ground, stared at us for a full 5 seconds and having heard our “Sorry”s and “Are you okay?”, he then clumsily got up, brushed the dust off his pants, felt about his legs and started complaining. You basket! If a person was injured after falling off a bike, he would reflexively feel for the ‘pain’ with his hands – not this.

Ask me, what do I label this sort of people as? — 见钱眼开的烂人。A person whose eyes open up so wide, that the sockets have become so huge with this recurring muscle reflex action that his eyeballs are bound to fall out one day and dangle on his face, at the sight of money.

Shanghai oh Shanghai, she isn’t at all like what you and I imagine it to be. ~

Sorry I digressed. Just jokin’ =D

I had to move on. We went to Macdonalds for dinner and then headed to Carrefour to get the rest of the things we needed. Our house aircon has been working really well since last weekend, Sean had to buy a blanket because his room temperature is so much colder than mine. For me, a cheap bath towel and my denim jacket was sufficient to keep me warm at night. We looked around further for scissors, utensils, pencils (for me to do sketching) and so on.

Just nearby our house, there is a convenience store called the “C-store” which has a red tomato for its logo, and adopts the colour scheme and branding of 7-11. Yes, red and green. Eeek, I think there are more than one imitation of 7-11 around here. In a corner, they sell food like sotong balls, fish balls, sausages and stuff on skewers kept warm constantly. Sean would complain everytime we enter the store that the cooked food stinks the place, but I don’t find it as offending. This was okay, sotong balls in spicy sauce:

[ Expenses ] :
8 rmb (lunch), 135 rmb (DVDs), 50 rmb (BASKET), 17 rmb (Macs), 177 rmb (at Carrefour) ++ misc

I cleared out half the clothes, alll unwanted, from the closet, but I still face a huge problem in picking what to wear. I reformatted the laptop, found various sources to get the photoshop software but all forms of installation failed. In order to install the cs3, I had to download something called framework 2.0. After I downloaded, the entire comp went berserk, kept auto restarting and I couldn’t even restore anything. Oh the time gone to waste. I reformatted, again, photoshop disc didn’t work, again. I didn’t go to school that day, and had to send the entire 20mb psd file to the cdi team members using the pc just because I couldn’t do anything on my laptop. And guess what, either the sending failed or it took damn damn long to attach the file because of the unusally slow connection on both sides. How the hell can all these happen at the same time? What am I doing cdi for? I don’t know for sure anymore. Lack of motivation. All I need is that ONE thing; to spur me on, to get up on my feet and start running. To make me feel alive once again. And I know that ONE thing might not be easily found in the words that come from any of you. It might be a person, it might be a situation, it might be an incident, a cat, or when school reopens, or the urgent demand to produce work that forces me to continue.

There has got to be sacrifices. But in the end, I still want to do a lot of other things. Simply put, I’m extremely frustrated. Even more so knowing that this cycle won’t end any sooner than I want it to. Don’t wanna do work, don’t want to. Don’t want to!!!

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Tomorrow is a new day. Cheers~

Patience is running out.. God, help me.

* * * * * * * * * *

Ever since a friend of mine related to me an absurd story, I always wanted to blog about it. It was only yesterday though, haha. My friend is an undeniably hot chick, with great qualities and has a mile of suitors queuing in the line. Among these suitors, there are the skinny but good-looking ones who take things slow – who want to be more than best friends and promise to wait even when they know she’s furthering her studies overseas – and also those who are just too good for her; as good as garbage.

It happened that this friend met a guy by the name of Garbage at her cousin’s birthday party, and he invited her to go cycling. He was someone she barely knew for a day. When she smsed him to reject the invitation, he called her up and spent a good two hours rattling on and on about how she attractive she was at the party and how she caught his eyes (wait. why doesn’t this happen to me?). Towards the end of the conversation, she had a nasty shock when he, all of a sudden, told her something like “Now I’m going to offer you an indecent proposal, but you can’t tell anyone.“:

Indecent proposal #1 – Stay

1. Overnight at my house (please forget your clothes, you can wear mine. or none)

2. Watch some movies that you like or I think you would like (would porn be good?)

3. Switch on the aircon (atmosphere, lady)

4. Bring some food like strawberries that we can feed each other with (wouldn’t we all be hungry after.. that?)

5. Only 24 tickets left (hurry or else you’ll be the 25th that night)

::: Underlying message: Let’s do it at my house, I’m lazy to travel, much less ask you on a proper date.

Indecent proposal #2 – Trip

1. Travel to Malaysia (I can’t think of a better place)

2. Take a bit of trouble to plan the trip (why, cause I wouldn’t want to land up in the bushes)

3. Book a hotel (voila! the magic word! Prendo un letto matrimoniale *ask Esther about it*)

4. Just the two (2) of us, unless more join in along the way (babies? anyone?)

5. Avoid having trouble bringing things out of Malaysia at the customs (did I mention, babies?)

::: Underlying message: Yeah yeah, gonna spend some time and money on you, but I’ll get the sex. By the way, you could help me load the baggages as well thank you.

Being smart as she is, she told him a downright NO and that he can leave his creative proposals to all the other girls.

I always thought girls are the ones who bother to go a full circle before getting to the main point? What Garbage had been trying so hard to say was just, “Hey chick, you’re hot. Let me **** you?” So for the first time, it occurred to me that sub-species of Things You Find In The Bin like this exist, only that I haven’t been in contact with one before. They obviously have been very much deprived, poor things. Where did their dignity go?

The next time he dares to call, I’ll grab the phone from my friend and make sure I bang the phone so hard it sends him straight to the school for the deaf. But again, I think she can do it very well too.

Hi there, I hope you get your share of rotten strawberries and fresh garbage hurled in your face.
What an EFFIN’ piece of wonderful crap.